Because of their extraordinary sacrifices and contributions, veterans have earned the right to free health care as a continuing cost of national defense. The Veterans Health Care Eligibility Reform Act of 1996 authorized eligible veterans access to Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care and brought us closer to meeting our moral obligation as a nation to care for veterans and generously provide them the benefits and health care they rightfully deserve.
Due to perennially inadequate health care budgets, the VA health care system can no longer meet the needs of our nation's service-connected disabled veterans. To ensure the viability of the VA health care system for current and future service-connected disabled veterans, it is imperative that our government provide an adequate health care budget to enable VA to serve the needs of disabled veterans nationwide. In order to ensure that these needs are met, it is imperative that the funding for the VA health care system be made a mandatory account, and that all service-connected disabled veterans, and all other enrolled veterans, be able to access the system in a timely manner.
The VA reports that it has now reached capacity at many health care facilities around the country. This has hampered timely access to quality health care for our nation's veterans, including some of our most severely disabled veterans. Making VA health care funding mandatory is a reasonable solution to address this problem and meet the growing backlog for care.
Make veterans' medical care funding mandatory. Under budget law, a mandatory program is one that requires provision of benefits to all who meet the eligibility requirements of the law. These are called "mandatory" programs because the authorizing law mandates funding sufficient to cover the expenses of the program, and funding is not subject to varying discretionary appropriations in the budget each year. If veterans' health care were a mandatory program, sufficient funding to treat enrolled veterans who fell under its mandatory provisions would be guaranteed for so long as the authorizing law remained in effect. Veterans would not have to fight for sufficient funding in the budget process every year as they now do.
Mandatory health care funding would not create an individual entitlement to health care, nor change the VA's current mission. Making veterans' health care funding mandatory would also eliminate the year-to-year uncertainty about funding levels that have prevented the VA from being able to adequately plan for and meet the growing needs of veterans seeking treatment. Rationed health care is no way to honor America's obligation to the brave men and women who have so honorably served our nation and continue to carry the physical and mental scars of that service.
Click HERE to ask your Representative and Senators to co-sponsor and support H.R. 515 and S. 331
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